Chapter 19: Lockbox Memory (Keepsake)

     Endor puzzled over the crazed patterns of sigils that wove through one another trailing off into infinity. She could make no sense of any of it, nothing to orient herself in this alien mind. So she pared down her expectations to only what she could recognize and understand, and looked deep into the distortion field and therein she saw a color, and while it wasn’t much, it was something. A blued silver, and once she saw it, she saw it everywhere, and showed it to Heathcliff and told her to follow its pipes and ligaments through the superstructure. A huge engine hummed above them, drawing, changing, and transferring energy into patterns of sigils that flipped and stacked and discharged. Their thread took them down, into where the subconscious ought to be, but the whole system was scrambled.
     It was a while looking into that fractal space that Endor realized the patterns in her good eye and the patterns in her bad eye were vaguely similar. She lifted her eyepatch and suddenly the two images fused together into one, and the structure that had been built there made sense, or somewhat more sense. It was a harlequin machine, made up of masked entities and diamond patterned mirrors and in the center was suspended from a chord of technicolor threads, a vermillion eye that shot about nervously, jittering in its liquid capsule. Endor approached and laid her hand on it and the whole of Vermilla shook and quaked so she called Heathcliff over and they put the hand of glory on it and went inside.

     There they saw a shack bathed in moonlight and alighted on the ice packed earth at its entry. Endor peeked inside and saw Heathcliff on a loft above a herd of nested pigs in hay - but it wasn’t Heathcliff. Not quite. It was Vermilla. Young as Heathcliff was now and nearly identical, only a bit sturdier in frame, and she drank rice wine and smoked clove, petting a cat and turning him over in her hands. Her attention shifted as, assembling below, Her Dark Revenge had stolen into the room, the brims of their hats drawn low over their eyes. They said it was time. They would make her like them. Her chin tensioned looking down at her pet, and she set him aside. Only faltering in the moment a little, running her fingers down his shoulders, then drank the last of the rice wine, and threw her legs over the side to descend the ladder, a tear caught in the fuzz of her face. “Bring the cat,” Her Dark Revenge ordered. So she tucked him into her arms and slid down, thumping the bars awkwardly.
     On the outside, she looked back at her home and flicked the last cherry of her cigarette into the straw. Then took her place side-straddle behind the broom rider, holding the cat close, and watched the property start to catch in flames, swallowed up by the clouds rolling into the mountaintop village. 
     Her glossy liquored eyes looked out over the dark world. Grey tufts of snow alighting across her face. Then, in the underexposed void, the upper heights of a bulging cliff face came rising out and swallowed them up. They flew through the narrow rock crevice into the heart of the mountain, then straight up a vertical shaft, carved from the rock, all around with alcoves where the desiccate dead curled into themselves, hugging their legs, heads resting forever on knees or rolled back into eternal slumber, jaws slack in horror or gone altogether.
     Up into a dimly lit vaulted chamber they ascended, then softened and eased onto a landing. There they strode through narrow corridors of darkened cells, up stairs into halls paneled loosely with rough timber where the earth was pungent with moisture and the lamps dull. Up further into richer, glossier halls with tapestries and wainscoting. She held her cat close, telling him he was doing so well, that he was always a very good cat. Then climbed a rusted wrought-iron staircase up to a ruin set atop the mountain peak, lively with wild flurries of snow. A pyramidal comet shined, its tail sparkling like a burning oil slick across the night sky, and descending from that void and alighting upon the frigid steps they saw a giant woman - though sharing none of the infirmities or awkwardness that normally accompany the distinction - “Vermilla,” she said, “so good to see you.”
     Vermilla kissed the cat and sniffed deep into his hair, unable to look at anything but the cat.
     “Remember what you wanted,” the titan said. “You’ll feel nothing. Be nothing; yet always will be. Forever, on across the stars and all lives. Never hurt again by the ceaseless horrors of the blind machine returning us again and again to this pain. We may never escape, but we may yet be free from the pain. Nothing, Vermilla, can hurt a dark reflection.”
     She looked out across the dark glistening eyes of Her Dark Revenge. The cat’s head was wet.
     “I can give that to you,” said the titan, and wrapped her long hand around Jenny’s back. “It’s time, Give him to me,” she held out a long scooped hand for the cat.
     Jenny puffed hot air into the loose skin and fur of his neck and hugged him close, then his long slender body was pulled away by the ruff. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’ll always be together.”
     Without the cat, Vermilla hugged tightly only to herself.
     Endor looked to Heathcliff, who watched stern and unflinching as the cat was killed and the ritual went under way, a sort of surgery of the interior.
     “Is this what they’ve got planned for you?” Endor asked Heathcliff.
     “I don’t know,” she watched as they wrenched away the treasures from that shaking body, “she used to be so beautiful,” Heath whispered under the screaming, “I wish I could have told her that.”
     “Why not tell it to me now,” said the Giant, who had turned to them, its hollow eyes trailing incandescent after-images, dying out like fading planets.
     “I am far more now than I ever was,” she said and gestured to the comet as though summoning its structure from that vast distance, its size exceeded the senses, a thing more real than real in its complexity, an ocean of electrochemical patterns and within it the mad-eyed leviathans and outrages only felt in part on a dark night alone after the day’s tresspasses.